Effects of Statistical Learning of Adjacent and Nonadjacent Dependencies on Processing of Syntactic and Semantic Information in Korean Sentences

This study investigates whether statistical learning (SL) of adjacent and nonadjacent dependencies has an effect on processing each of local and long-distance dependencies in Korean sentences. Data were collected from 48 native Korean adults who were administered separate SL tasks involving adjacent and non-adjacent dependencies, as well as a self-paced reading task and a working memory task. Participants with high adjacent/non-adjacent SL ability tended to spend more time in reading semantically incongruent regions of sentences including local/long-distance dependencies. These findings suggest that individual differences in SL ability may contribute to variations in processing adjacent and non-adjacent semantic dependencies in Korean sentences.